Some violinists announce themselves the moment the bow meets the string. Ursula Bagdasarjanz is one of them.
Born in Winterthur in 1934 — her father Romanian, her mother a violinist of genuine accomplishment — she came up through a pedagogical lineage that reads like a map of twentieth-century string playing. She studied with Aida Sticki, who would later shape the young Anne-Sophie Mutter; she took a first prize at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris; she worked with Sándor Végh in Basel and attended master classes with Max Rostal, himself a pupil of Carl Flesch, the great Berlin pedagogue whose The Art of Violin Playing remains a kind of Talmud for the instrument. This is not a provincial career dressed up in cosmopolitan clothes. Bagdasarjanz absorbed serious traditions and made them her own.
The Bach Sonata in a minor for unaccompanied violin — the second of the three sonatas, with its ferocious fugue — is the most unforgiving piece on this program. There is nowhere to hide. Bagdasarjanz doesn’t try to. Her intonation in the upper positions is clean to the point of being almost severe, and the fugue’s contrapuntal lines emerge with real independence, not blurred into a wash of vibrato. Double-stops ring — actually ring, with the overtones sitting in the air above the instrument. Her phrasing in the opening Grave has weight without heaviness, which is harder than it sounds.
Then there is the Nardini.
Pietro Nardini spent most of his career in Stuttgart and Florence, was praised extravagantly by Leopold Mozart (of all people), and has been largely consigned to the footnotes of music history ever since. Unjustly. The Sonata in D major here has a “Larghetto” of real beauty — the kind of singing melody that sits in the violin’s sweet spot just above the staff, where a player with genuine tone can make the room go quiet. Bagdasarjanz has that tone. It’s silvery but not thin, warm without the cloying thickness some violinists mistake for expressiveness. I found myself wishing there were more Nardini on the program.
Mozart’s Sonata in B flat major, K. 378, is a work with an odd double identity. Published in 1781 in Vienna, it was actually composed several years earlier in Salzburg, and it retains something of the galant ease of that period — the violin and keyboard genuinely sharing the argument, neither subordinate to the other, the way Mozart’s mature sonatas insist upon. Bagdasarjanz and pianist Fernande Kaeser understand this. The interplay feels conversational rather than competitive, and the slow movement in particular has a naturalness of phrasing that eludes many more celebrated teams. (One oddity: the finale appears split across two tracks, which is — there is no other word for it — bizarre.)
The Bartók First Rhapsody closes the program, and here Bagdasarjanz really digs in. The piece is rooted in Hungarian village music — specifically in the lassú and friss forms Bartók documented obsessively in his ethnomusicological fieldwork — and it demands a violinist who can navigate between concert-hall finish and something rawer, less groomed. Bagdasarjanz uses a fast vibrato, but she knows when to narrow it, when to let a note speak with less cultivation, more edge. The Hungarian gypsy idiom doesn’t embarrass her, which is not something you can say about every Central European-trained soloist who has attempted it.
The Swiss label Gallo eventually released five volumes of Bagdasarjanz recordings; this first one, apparently reissued, offers the clearest window onto what she does well. She is not a showman. She doesn’t push sound for its own sake, doesn’t linger in moments for effect. What she offers instead is precision in service of music — a phrase that can sound like faint praise but isn’t, not when the precision is this complete and the musicianship this sure. Highly recommended.
